I made it (sort of)
Do you remember doing a careers assessment exercise at school? When I did one, it came out as "Environmental Consultant." Being a green, and a monumental smartarse, this looked just up my street.

Fast forward eight years - I had finished my MSc course in Environmental Impact Assessment*, Auditing** and Management Systems*** and fell into freelancing. I developed a campaign for the student group People and Planet - see peopleandplanet.org/gogreen - and wrote a paper for an association. Things were looking up.

I then got myself a proper job as an environmental consultant - actually my job title was just "Environmentalist" - you can now find Chartered Environmentalists, so it does make sense. It was with a small firm in a beautiful place near Bath.

Fast forward three weeks after I started - I was in hospital, seriously ill: my skin was falling off [which prompted the username], I was bright red, not-quite-with-it for much of the time and my hair was falling out. Oh, and I'd lost my job.

I had developed a very nasty reaction to some medicine I had been taking for several months. It took me eight months to recover and to get myself a new job. I ended up temping for a further eight months before I found a proper job, which I'm still in. So, while one of my MSc mates is earning "six figures", I'm busy f-ing about with databases for a living, but at least it's at an environmental journal. Ho-hum.

* part of the planning process for big developments
** looking for environmental nastiness and misbehaviour, basically
*** setting up internal systems to avoid creating environmental nastiness and misbehaviour
( Parmesan Quality b4 Quantity, Thu 29 Mar 2007, 21:50, Reply)